How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

conquest of the world as it is. Unfortunately the day¬ dream leads only to further discouragement. A child who is discouraged and cannot solve a problem in algebra allows this wish-fulfilling'faculty of imagina¬ tion and phantasy to transport him, by an effortless leap, to the time when he is already an engineer ordering his subordinates to work out the detail problems of bridge construction for him. The inventor who takes the facts of wireless and the facts of the cinema and combines them in his imagination into the new constellation of television, and then proceeds to work out the problem of uniting these disparate techniques to a new end, useful to humanity, is at the other pole. The criterion of social usefulness must be applied before we can interpret the value of imagination. Used constructively, that is, in a socially useful way, imagination is one of the most valuable human faculties ; used as a tool of subjective ego-inflation, it becomes daydream and bizarre phantasy, and is only a step removed from delusion and hallucination. About Dreams One of the most important discoveries of modern psychology is the discovery made by Alfred Adler that the dream is not an inexplicable, accidental occurrence in the process of life, but a valuable device which we use during the training-process of approaching our individual goal of security and happiness. Although Freud was the first to point out that the dream was determined by our unconscious, it remained for Adler to demonstrate that the dream had a useful function. Like imagination, the dream always represents a bridge between the present and the future. It differs only slightly in its nature and processes from imagination and phantasy, and perhaps its most distinctive quality is the fact that its terms are the terms of archaic thought-processes, similar to the thought world of the young child, or the savage. The following important facts should be understood in the dream :—